1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to mobile device availability detection and, more specifically, to determining and relaying availability of a mobile device user.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous. People carry them to meetings, use them out of the office, in social situations, and in other settings where wireless communication is needed. Incoming voice calls to mobile devices can be intrusive under certain situations. It is therefore desirable to allow callees (e.g., a receiving user) to screen calls and decide in advance whether the calls warrant answering. Caller ID service is conventionally available to provide a callee with limited information about a call for call screening purposes, with the callee usually having very few options to manage the call. In particular, for most callees, the only available actions are to accept the call or decline it by either not answering or allowing an answering machine or voice mail system to respond. The caller in such cases has no control over whether or not the call will be accepted.
More advanced Caller ID services can provide the callee with limited interaction with the caller to assist the call screening process, thereby giving both the caller and the callee more control over the call. However, despite the limited interaction, the caller still has no effective way of knowing when the callee is willing to accept their call.
Currently there are models and mechanisms, such as those defined by the presence and availability management (PAM) standards, that provide APIs a caller's mobile application software can use to check for the availability of a callee. However, the presence status in such services has typically been limited to a user specifying his/her availability status by manually selecting options such as online, busy, away, etc. Further, presence status in such services is often made accessible only to users within that service.